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May 25, 2007

Popfly: Sign of a Closer Microsoft-Yahoo Relationship?

Duncan Riley

21 comments »

Despite a frenzy of speculation earlier this month, Microsoft has not acquired Yahoo. However buried amongst numerous reports at the time was speculation that the two companies could form a stronger relationship as part of an “Anyone but Google” grouping.

Microsoft Popfly could demonstrate part of a new relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft.

popfly1.pngThe private alpha test of mashup and widget creator Popfly was announced May 18 and is pitched as a Yahoo Pipes competitor. It’s expected that these sorts of services focus strongly on the respective creators products. Popfly doesn’t include one pre-set “block” relating to any Google property, yet offers a range of Yahoo blocks including Yahoo News, Traffic, Answers and blocks for the Yahoo owned Flickr and Upcoming.

Some Yahoo blocks could be offered due to Microsoft’s lack of home grown coverage of some verticals, and yet Yahoo News is offered alongside MSN News Feeds, Flickr along with My Live Spaces Photos.

If Microsoft is aiming to provide a more inclusive product with Popfly, why are there no Google blocks? There is any number of Google related products that could improve the mashup experience on Popfly. It’s difficult to believe that exclusion of all Google products was anything other than intentional. Conversely the inclusion of Yahoo related blocks that compete with Microsoft offerings must have been decided upon by someone, and the purpose of this is questionable: why Yahoo, why now?

All of this is not to take away from Popfly, it looks like a great service, yet even from small things, one can find hidden meaning.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Dekut.com

    May 26th, 2007 at 11:37 am

  2. TechCrunch Japanese

    May 27th, 2007 at 6:25 am

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  1. Search Engine WEB

    May 25th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    from a business angle it is understandable why they would not want to give Google any more attention of potential traffic…

    However, from a Developer and User angle it is a significant void

  2. Duncan Riley

    May 25th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    Search Engine Web
    strong point, they’ve sort of gone half way and favored Yahoo in the process.

  3. Steve S

    May 26th, 2007 at 12:54 am

    I think it’s just as you said, Microsoft doesn’t want its new mashup engine being buried in Google’s limelight. Basically, they are saying that if Google wants to join the mashup generation party they are going to have to do it themselves.

    This makes a lot of sense, considering the fact that if Microsoft were to include too many Google blocks chances are pretty good that people might forget that this is an MS toy and not just another Google widget.

    Either way, Popfly looks like it will be extremely entertaining and I can’t wait to try it out.

  4. Carl

    May 26th, 2007 at 1:38 am

    Is there any broader moral to this story? It illustrates, I think, one of the problems with tech journalism. The career reporters show poor judgement, because they’ve never been on the inside. Some of the most interesting news, and analysis, comes from insiders like Arrington, who has been bouncing around the Valley for most of the past decade. But they suffer, not just from conflicts of interest, but also from the perpetual risk that something they write will be at odds with something they’ve done, as Arrington has demonstrated here.

  5. Kewtr

    May 26th, 2007 at 1:47 am

    Carl, Arrington didn’t write it.

    Duncan, I think one reason might be the extreme simplicity that Yahoo APIs can be put to use. REST instead of SOAP, JSON responses if you want, and a 2 second registration.

    Looks like there are quite a few easier Google ones now, so I guess they should have Maps, News and Picasa.

    Even so, it could just be a question of priority rather than exclusion.

  6. cfJeff

    May 26th, 2007 at 6:01 am

    If MS doesn’t include Google information in the mashup, what use is it?

    Has anyone (other than MS shills) used Popfly?

  7. bdb

    May 26th, 2007 at 6:18 am

    Kewtr, it is amazing how difficult some find it to simply look at the submission’s author. But Carl has obviously been reading valleywag’s latest post on MA, as one can easily see from this excerpt:

    The career reporters show poor judgement, because they’ve never
    been on the inside. Some of the most interesting news, and analysis,
    comes from insiders like Arrington, who has been bouncing around
    the Valley for most of the past decade. But they suffer, not just from
    conflicts of interest, but also from the perpetual risk that something
    they write will be at odds with something they’ve done, as Arrington
    has demonstrated here.

    Real original Carl, you need a beating!

  8. Anand

    May 26th, 2007 at 8:08 am

    Duncan I cannot see any article from you pointing out google. Probably you can do a search for Microsoft gadgets here
    http://desktop.google.com/plugins/?hl=en

    and write a new article on that.

  9. AGronowski

    May 26th, 2007 at 10:48 am

    Microsoft claims that Silverlight will be platform independent and it intends to have it replace Flash. However, this exclusion with Popfly, the very flagship application of Silverlight, betrays their true intention. Anyone who thinks that they intend Silverlight to be platform independent once it kills Flash and its successors (an unlikely scenario) will be sadly mistaken.

  10. Pete Lamerre

    May 26th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    Given that over 50% of all mashups are driven by the Google maps API, this makes this pretty useless. I suppose the Popfly folks don’t want their tool to be used, then?

  11. Avatar

    May 26th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    MS has sended me my invitation, and i can say that i do think is because the easy api and the fact yahoo support json output, that and because as i said someone when the microsoft-yahoo rumor happened, Ms never intended to buy yahoo, the rumor was spread as a favor to give them some market gain and part of a coperation deal they inked in 2006. i of course cannot disclose how i know this..

    and on the other hand, it will be stupid of microsoft to offer google blocks… you can stil create them if you want.. but offer them by default would be folish, however they neede to offer a second choice for goodwill, so it is completely logical they choosed yahoo for it.

  12. Mike Street

    May 26th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    I’ve been playing around with Popfly and it’s cool. I’m glad to see it going to be moved over to Facebook and I can’t wait for the service to be extended out.

  13. Mr. Moo

    May 26th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

    As Avatar said, users can create and share their own blocks, so the lack of Google blocks by default doesn’t decrease the power of Popfly. Users have already created blocks for Netflix, World of Warcraft, PaperbackSwap, etc.

  14. JasonM

    May 26th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    The integration of Popfly with Visual Studio seems to be Microsofts way of enticing a larger number of developers to use their dev environments … even though they say they are targetting “non-developers”.

    and

    Why would Popfly include mashups with Google maps when Microsoft has Virtual Earth / Live Local?

  15. jan2x

    May 27th, 2007 at 9:25 am

    When will it be before Google just create their own version of popfly, that will include everyone on the web?

  16. Brandon Paddock

    May 27th, 2007 at 4:43 pm

    Why assume that Microsoft “decided” anything? Google doesn’t offer open access to most of their services, least of all in easily consumable XML formats as I believe PopFly prefers.

  17. Tifany

    June 4th, 2007 at 7:13 am

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